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It's an Auction, Jim, but Not as We Know It

Outfits from the wardrobe departments of "Star Trek" television shows and movies will be sold in October.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

The stuff of "Star Trek" — uniforms, communicators and other props, including pointy rubber ears — has boldly gone to a place where the intrepid crew never took the Enterprise: the Bronx.

In a windowless warehouse in Crotona Park East, boxes of "Star Trek" memorabilia that were shipped from the part of the galaxy known as Hollywood are being cataloged and photographed. The catalogers and photographers work for Christie's, the auction house that more often handles impressionists and old masters.

The trove will be sold for dollars. Not Federation credits.

So, hanging on one coat rack in the warehouse are Klingon costumes. On another are the Enterprise crew's uniforms, even William Shatner's uniform. "It's a great" — long pause — "leisure suit," said Cathy Elkies, the Christie's official overseeing the sale.

"Star Trek" fans are passionate. They attend conventions. They know "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." They correct dumb mistakes, no matter how obscure, in any articles having anything to do with "Star Trek." They take the idea of being a fan to extremes, and proudly so. And they are not Christie's usual crowd. No one dressed as a Klingon was in attendance when Christie's sold the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sashayed into Madison Square Garden and sang "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy.

So when Christie's marketers asked Ms. Elkies who was the intended audience for the sale, which is scheduled for Oct. 5-7, she did not have a ready answer. "I had to say, I really don't know," she said.

That is partly because so few actual props from the various television series and films have been sold before. The items in the sale had been stored in warehouses, some since the original 1960's television series went off the air. But after the cancellation of the UPN prequel "Star Trek: Enterprise" last year, Paramount decided to lighten its holdings.

Now Christie's is preparing descriptions for each item — descriptions that are decidedly different from the ones usually found in Christie's catalogs.

Consider this one, for a pair of items that Christie's expects to sell for $1,000 to $1,500: "Two tribbles of imitation fur stuffed with foam rubber, one gray and black, the other white, gray and brown."

Tribbles were small life forms that reproduced at remarkable rates, according to Memory-Alpha.org, one of many sites on the Web devoted to "Star Trek." Christie's says this pair was used in the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" and also in a "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode.

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Ms. Elkies said she was approaching the sale in "a democratic way" — meaning, she explained, "We are pricing it so there will be something for everyone." She said there would be items with estimated prices of $200 or so.

But the estimates on some items are far higher. Christie's expects to sell a model of the Starship Enterprise-A, made from a plastic hobby kit and used on "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" in 1991, for $15,000 to $25,000. According to the Memory-Alpha site, the Enterprise-A had made its debut in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and had gone on a surprisingly speedy journey to the center of the galaxy in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier."

Christie's also has a model of a Work Bee, which, according to Memory-Alpha, was "a small utility craft in use by the Federation since the mid-23rd century." Ms. Elkies said this one was used in the drydock sequences in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and also in the main title sequence of "Deep Space Nine." Christie's estimates that it will sell for $6,000 to $8,000 at the auction.

Ms. Elkies said she was impressed by the craftsmanship of the costumes and props. "If you see something on TV, you don't think there's a backside to it," she said. "But you see these things and you realize how much time and labor went into each object."

And then there was the Xindi alien in the stasis chamber from the series "Enterprise." The stasis chamber was a clear plastic cylinder. The Xindi alien was a yellow figure about the size of a 5-year-old child, with wires attached to places that, on a human, would be painful if attached without anesthetic.

Ms. Elkies was not a major "Star Trek" fan before she started to organize the sale. She got her baptism in "Star Trek" mania when she went to a convention in Germany in May. "The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or Klingon that they were speaking," she said.

At 41, she was a small child when "Star Trek" originally went on the air. "I think it was so different than anything else that was on," she said. "Remember, we had five channels back then, so we weren't inundated with programming the way we are now. It was so original, it was so different, it was gripping, there was always something that hooked you in — and Captain Kirk was very cute."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: It's an Auction, Jim, But Not as We Know It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe